- The Ring app now sends notifications with AI-generated text descriptions
- Each alert tells you what’s happening in the video before you watch it
- The feature is rolling out to Ring Premium users in the US and Canada today
TechRadar Smart Home Week
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If you’ve got a Ring security camera or doorbell, there’s good news – you can now get AI-generated notifications on your phone, describing exactly what’s happening before you’ve watched the video.
Each notification will include a brief snippet of text describing what triggered the motion detection, so you can decide whether it needs your attention or not at a glance before you tap through and open the app.
The notifications are designed to be as succinct as possible, focusing on the person, animal, or object that’s moving, and what they’re doing.
Video descriptions work with all Ring video doorbells and cameras, and are rolling out to Ring Premium subscribers in the US and Canada from today (international release dates are yet to be announced). For more details about Ring memberships and pricing, take a look at our full guide to Ring subscriptions.
This isn’t the first time Ring has used AI to describe what’s going on in your video clips. Earlier this year, the company launched Smart Video Search, which lets you use natural language to look for specific events recorded by your doorbell or camera, so you don’t have to spend time scrubbing through footage to find a particular moment.
Did you see something?
Ring’s Video Descriptions (as the feature is officially known) sound like a welcome addition to the company’s best video doorbells and best home security cameras, and I’m looking forward to testing them myself to see how accurate they are.
Back in 2023, my colleague Lance Ulanoff tested a security camera that promised to deliver AI-generated notifications based on analysis of a single frame of video. The Psync Camera Genie S is compact and cute-looking, with features including object-tracking, but its Chat GPT-powered descriptions were often wide of the mark.
During testing, the camera produced a deluge of notifications, which were often comically inaccurate. While it could usually detect people, it would often say they were carrying something that they weren’t, and once the camera claimed an entire family was sitting around an empty dining room table. Psync’s software also hallucinated a motorcycle visible in a closed shed, and a child playing in a deserted yard.
Two years is a long time in tech, so I’m cautiously optimistic that Ring’s smart descriptions will be much more accurate than that.
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